Who will Trump's cultists blame when they finally understand they've been conned?

(Be aware: NAC is going away soon)

Donald Trump's entire "career" in and out of politics has been one long, sustained confidence trick. The owners of capital "get it," and shill with enthusiasm because they can only gain from the con man's game.

Generally speaking, when the victims of a con game realize they've been duped, they're angry. It may or may not be the con man's fault, but it's not theirs; no one likes looking in the mirror and confronting their own gullibility.

Politically, it's never been about Trump's narcissistic grifting. Rather, it's about wealth consolidating its power and enhancing its vampiric capital accumulation as the populace is distracted by the grift; and, it's about those Americans, primarily white, who've embraced Trump's con game with open arms.


When they realize they've been had, as inevitably they will, who's up to be blamed? It won't be Trump himself, as rejecting a deity is hard work, and he'll be exonerated by having been "stabbed in the back" or some such nonsense.

It won't be the con man's disappointed victims, swindled and left to founder, because the mirror's cracked by the weight of the dominant caste racism and gibberish.

I think most of us already have a suspicion about the answer to this question, and it's not a pleasant one. In a collective sense, why do humans cherish being conned? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pitchfork to sharpen.

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This "Never Trumper" is hilarious. She cannot countenance the grift, but on the other hand, because providing health care and other basic public services would be both unAmerican and unfair to the accumulators of capital, she just might change her mind. 

Yawn.   

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

The Second Time Around.

When you elect grifters to manage a country, don't be surprised if they set the dumpster on fire and walk away with their pockets stuffed with cash.

The Emotionally Challenging Next Phase of the Pandemic, by Juliette Kayyem (The Atlantic)

The end of summer is a bitter reminder: America’s coronavirus ordeal won’t end when 2020 does.

 ... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got some Americans’ hopes up with its recent instruction that states should be ready to distribute a coronavirus vaccine in the next couple of months. President Donald Trump is desperate to convince the public that a vaccine to COVID-19 will arrive by a politically convenient deadline: “maybe even before November 1,” he said Friday, or “some time in the month of October.”

But Trump’s Operation Warp Speed is an election ploy, not a guarantee of scientific progress. Drug companies that are competing to develop vaccines are banding together to resist political pressure to take shortcuts in safety testing. On NPR Thursday, Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said that an effective vaccine by the end of next month is “extremely unlikely” and that population-wide distribution of a vaccine could take until the middle of next year.

In other words, the American coronavirus crisis will end—just not soon. “With a combination of public-health measures with a vaccine that’s reasonably good,” the infectious-diseases expert Anthony Fauci told me in a recent online interview, “by the time we get around through 2021, we can start having some form of normality. Maybe not exactly the way it was, but certainly different than what we’re doing right now.” Fauci’s prediction is based on the best-case scenario in which, “as we get into 2021, we should start seeing a substantial number of [vaccine] doses available.”

This timetable comes as difficult news. Summer is ending. Americans were told that this season, the season of outdoors and open windows, would create the best conditions to manage COVID-19 ...

American Idiot.

Taibbi's analysis is brilliant.

Pogo's Axiom has never died: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over, by Matt Taibbi (Medium)

The race is tightening. Is America sure it's ready to give up its addiction to crazy?

In this sense the Republican Party’s 2020 platform is genius: there isn’t one, just a commitment to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” meaning whatever Trump says at any given moment. If one can pull back enough from the fact that this impacts our actual lives, it’s hard not to admire the breathtaking amorality of this, as one might admire a simple malevolent organism like a virus or liver fluke.

ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

In my previous life as a thoughtful and periodically fashionable essayist, one forever attuned to local foibles and frivolity, there’d be so very much to write about, right about … now.

Alas, those days are gone.

For example, I might be considering the ham-fisted, forced resettlement of the kulaks – wait, wrong word; I meant “residents” of Riverview Tower as part of a yet-to-be-revealed master plan for the structure’s implosion, annexation, luxurious playpen refurbishment for the enrichment of our design and engineering caste, or all three, quite spectacularly.

But I can’t comment.

Conversely, taking cues from my old, discredited ways, I could be considering the ongoing, benumbed silence of the city's leading element, this glaring absence of our local Democratic Party’s ruling elite from virtually all major questions of the day during the past six months, from pandemic disarray through racial and social justice protests, not to omit the indie business segment’s increasing problems, rampant vehicular mayhem on city streets, and the Tree Board’s leading role in rampant deforestation.

Seeing as none of them have uttered a peep, I’ll happily follow suit. My lips? Think of them as seals.

It’s just water under the justice's I-64 bridge, and in spite of all that’s going down – and I mean WAAAAAY DOWN given the GOP death cult’s cocaine-fueled subterranean spiral – in this failed city, tucked inside a failed nation-state, located on a rapidly failing planet where Mother Nature is belching rather viciously in our general direction, traffic on the bridge in question stands to be disrupted for years to come, and of course if we’d bothered setting up the city to accommodate multi-modal transportation options, these disruptions might not be so damaging, but we haven’t, and they will be.

As yet our “leaders” are not unlike clams, and accordingly, you won’t hear a word from me.

After all, I’m retired. It's someone else's job to try locating a pulse. Many of you, at least the minority capable of rational thought, are wearing pandemic masks. I’ve chosen to double insulate, augmenting my contagion-containing fabric with a free-expression-free, anchor-logo chain mail muzzle, and it’s quite cozy.

There’s a void in the coverage area, but maybe the News and Tribune will fill this gap in truth-telling, because as we all know, laughter really is the best medicine, especially when reading Pastor May’s weekly old white guy theocracy sermon.

---

So much for the preamble. Last week’s writing therapy session was long even by the standards of this admittedly wordy weekly column.

ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t. At times, it can be downright debilitating. The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

And yet it was short in the sense that undertaking to distill one’s formative youthful experiences into words, whether 3 or 3,300, is at best a challenge, and probably impossible. Those weeks and years of external stimuli, so very long ago, burrowed artfully into a still developing brain. A handful of episodes stand out in the memory, but detailed contact tracing is almost impossible.

Hence my fascination, five decades later, at what it meant to be propagandized with blatant racism as a youth during George Wallace’s presidential campaigns, although it must be noted that by the time of my father’s enthused espousal of the Alabama governor’s cause in 1968, I’d already been exposed to the contagion of racism for the entirety of my eight years of life.

It matters not one bit whether the exposure was overt, because that’s what structural racism is all about. It's pervasive. Here’s one definition of many, courtesy of the Urban Institute.

Throughout this country’s history, the hallmarks of American democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.

At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

I can’t argue. Structural racism is irrefutable, and the inescapable corollary is this: “White people need to accept that they’re racist. All white people.” Here’s Kelli Maria Korducki with more at Medium:

Very few people would call themselves racist, and getting called out on racist behavior tends to elicit defensiveness. This reflex is so culturally ingrained that its scripts are practically punchlines: “I don’t see color.” “Some of my very best friends are Black” …

… In her bestselling 2018 book, White Fragility, the author and academic Robin DiAngelo argues that one of the functions of White privilege is to advance the myth that racism is an individual sin, as opposed to a collective indoctrination. “[T]he way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for White people to understand it,” she writes. “Given our racial insulation, coupled with misinformation, any suggestion that we are complicit in racism is a kind of unwelcome and insulting shock to the system.”

By framing racism as the scourge of an ignorant few, White people skirt the uncomfortable work of interrogating the perks of their own Whiteness and confronting the structures that uphold those perks. White privilege allows White people to believe that because they grew up poor, or have Black friends, or are descended from European immigrants who were once viewed as non-White, they themselves are exempt from White privilege — and, by extension, innocents in the perpetuation of racism.

DiAngelo proposes that we instead think of racism as a worldview that’s inevitably formed, and reinforced, by a racist society whose institutions deem Whiteness as a neutral standard. Instead of imagining themselves on either side of a bad/good binary of racist or not racist, she suggests that all White people reimagine themselves as occupying a movable position on a continuum of racism.

It probably isn’t possible to totally escape that continuum, she says; racism is so deeply embedded in society that it informs every facet of our experience and perspective. But by moving away from the binary framework, DiAngelo writes, White people can free themselves from the question of whether or not they are racist and instead ask themselves whether they are actively challenging racism as they go about their lives.

I’m quoting others today only because my own words haven’t yet come to me fully formed. Listening and learning is like being back in school, or stumbling through a new language. I’ll get there eventually. Until I do, I'll turn to those who are better than me at making the case.

---

Did you know that 110 years ago, the youthful Marx Brothers had a vaudeville routine called “Fun in Hi Skule”?

As an observer notes, it might have been called “Fun with Ethnic Stereotypes,” with the brothers and other actors portraying Germans, Italians, Jews, and the Irish. Jokes also were directed at gays.

At least no one wore blackface.

My most recent high school reunion was the 40th, which took place in 2018. I’ve attended at least a portion of most previous get-togethers, but two years ago I didn’t. My interest waned in the run-up, and that’s unusual for me as someone with an interest in history and a strong desire to record it.

I plead extenuating circumstances as they pertain to the lesser of two reasons for being a no-show, and that’s because I was uncharacteristically busy.

Pints&union was in the run-up to launching, and there were things that needed to be done. The pub’s prospective opening made me nervous, even if I wasn’t the owner. You'll recall that I'd been entirely out of the food and drink game for three years, and getting back into the swing of things at my advanced age took effort, albeit more mental than physical.

Another factor was lingering annoyance with my 35-year reunion in 2013, when I hosted a segment of the gathering at Bank Street Brewhouse. It transpired that an actual friend, with whom I’d spent much quality time during school daze (both high school and university), arrived at BSB loaded, whether literally or figuratively, and went out of his way to embarrass himself and me in front of my staff members, one of whom proposed to clean my friend's clock.

I was tempted to give him permission.

To be sure, everyone has bad nights. What's more, his ingratitude shouldn’t have mattered. In point of fact, he always was something of an asshole, which goes a long way toward explaining our friendship, given that I was (and remain) an asshole.

However, by 2016, it had become abundantly clear that my friend was in fact a born-again Trumpian bile spewer, filled to the brim with MAGA, outspoken and abrasive on the typically anti-social media platform of Facebook.

That ghost of George Wallace, yet again flatulent.

And this became a problem for me in 2018 as the class reunion approached. Facebook made crystal clear which of my former classmates were in sync with my values in socio-political terms, and which had spent the intervening decades gulping the toxic Kool-Aid.

The accounting kept coming back to me. I was not looking back in anger. It wasn’t about malice. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I found myself in disagreement with many of them (not all, of course), I tried to bear in mind that it was just a disagreement. This helped.

However, it was harder to escape the sadness.

Granted, the high school experience is ridiculously romanticized and vastly overrated. It was more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying several coats of rose-colored revisionism to celebrate those often maddening, frustrating years.

And yet, in spite of it, I look back on people and phases with satisfaction and even affection, hence the morose melancholy gripping me in 2018. In the end I didn't attend the reunion, precisely because I'd prefer to remember these folks the way they were, not grapple internally with what they had become.

It's as simple as that.

In high school most of the kids were apolitical, ignorant, and many times politically incorrect. On the whole, we shared the same goals, trying to make sense of adolescence and impending adulthood, figuring out what would come next, out there in the real world – as I understand it now, a world filled with racism, intolerance, greed and naked ambition.

I'd rather remember them the way they – we – were.

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Recent columns:

August 20: ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

Miracle Man.

Religion and politics intersect at the point of power, and how best to keep it. Hypocrisy only seems to be the inevitable consequence. In fact, it can't really be hypocritical if power was the basis for the equation from the very start.

Jerry Falwell Jr. might well have been telling the truth about his unzipped trousers. But this isn't the point, is it?

The Last Temptation of Jerry, by Jeet Heer (The Nation)

A scandal at Liberty University proves that white evangelicals are starting to copy Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., recently deposed as president of Liberty University, is a new type of Christian sinner. The figure of a pious hypocrite is as old as religion itself, an inevitable by-product of the fact that any moral system will be upheld by flawed people. But usually godly miscreants try to keep their transgressions secret.

A prime example is Jimmy Swaggart, who was disgraced and defrocked after revelations of hiring sex workers in 1987. Furtive, sweaty, twitchy, and given to wailing, “I have sinned,” Swaggart acted like an escapee from the fictions of Fyodor Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor: a God-haunted and superstitious primate driven by compulsions he could neither understand nor control. As creepy as he is, Swaggart has given every evidence of a complex and tormented inner life.

Falwell Jr., by contrast, is a shallower creature who has not tried to hide his misdeeds. Rather, he has flaunted them. The latest scandal involving Falwell Jr. grew out of a photo he himself posted on Instagram, showing him with his arms around a woman who was not his wife, both parties with their pants unzipped. “Yeah, it was weird,” Falwell admitted in a radio interview. “She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like… I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers. She’s my wife’s assistant, she’s a sweetheart. I should have never put it up and embarrassed her. I’ve apologized to everybody. I promised my kids I will try to be a good boy from here on out.”

This explanation wasn’t sufficient, coming as it did on top of a long list of previous scandals, including still unexplained land deals he made with his pool boy and photos seemingly showing him drinking and dancing at a Florida nightclub. These photos were a problem because Liberty University holds its students and staff to strict moral standards. Students can receive demerits if they dance with a partner of the opposite sex and be expelled for drinking. Sex outside of marriage is prohibited for students.

As Politico reported last year, Falwell Jr. was notorious for flouting these rules, taking an exhibitionist’s glee in lewd conversations ...

The Way We Were.

Lately I'm reminded of why I declined to attend my 40th high school reunion in 2018. Maybe I'm finally ready to be honest about it, even if I'm cognizant of it not mattering, in the least, either way.

For one thing, I was busy.

Pints&union was in the run-up to opening on August 1, and there were things that needed to be done. It made me very nervous, because you'll recall at the time that I'd been out of the food and drink game for three years. Getting back into it at an advanced age took effort, more mental than physical, and obviously none of us are as spry as we used to be.

But while it was a valid consideration, it's only a part of it.

Another aspect was lingering annoyance with 2013, when it was my great pleasure to host a portion of the reunion at Bank Street Brewhouse.

It transpired that one of my actual friends from high school arrived loaded (literally or figuratively) for bear, spent the evening complaining about mixed drink prices (at a brewery), harassing my staff (one of whom came to me and said if my "friend" didn't leave him alone, he'd have to begin throwing punches) and being an all-purpose tool.

My 'friend" embarrassed me greatly, and then, as it happened, the very same guy proved to be an avid, unapologetic MAGA-ite, which leads us to the third and most important factor in my (admittedly entirely personal) disaffection, this being the presidential election results in 2016.

In short, via the helpful medium of Facebook, I had a front row seat to observe the extent to which certain of my former classmates as yet were on the same wavelength as me in political terms, and which ones had gulped down the Trump Kool-Aid and become raging reactionaries, white supremacists, religion-obsessed theocrats, and, in short, stranded way out in right field somewhere.

And yet it wasn't anger with this state of affairs that convinced me to avoid the reunion party in 2018. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I disagree with them, it doesn't mean any more than that -- a disagreement.

Rather, it was sadness.

Granted, the high school experience is vastly overrated; it was far more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying rose-colored revisionism to an epic degree to celebrate those years.   

This being said, I look back on various people and phases with satisfaction and affection, hence the melancholy gripping me in 2018. I didn't show up because I'd prefer to remember them the way they were, not grapple internally with what they'd become.

It's as simple as that.

In high school most of the kids were apolitical, many times politically incorrect, mostly sharing the same goal of making sense of adolescence and trying to figure out what would come next, out in the real world.

I'd rather remember them -- us -- this way.

I don't even hold a grudge against the high school (and college) friend who made life miserable for me that evening at BSB in 2013. It's who he is, and actually, it's what he always was, an asshole, which is what drew us together in the beginning because I was, too.

We remain "friends" on Facebook, but I don't follow him, thus sparing me from an endless series of auto-erotic Trump mash notes, conspiracy memes and "all lives matter" bromides.

Unfollow, but remain "friends." It's mental health for our time, and maybe 2023 will be different.

Why 'destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea -- also, the Growth Ponzi Scheme revisited.

Exhibit 456-90-2020 in our series, "Nothing In America Makes Sense."

'Destroying the suburbs' should be a Republican idea, by Bonnie Kristian (The Week)

The Democrats, says President Trump, are going to destroy the suburbs ... so what, exactly, does destroying the suburbs entail?

Think: zoning.

Taken at face value, this is a bizarre policy choice for the Republican Party, both in its pre-2016 social conservatism and free-marketism and in its post-2016 Trumpian populism. Upzoning — allowing construction of buildings with more units or more nonresidential units than was previously permitted in a given area — seems like it should fit the GOP agenda.

It's a move toward greater economic freedom and stronger property rights. It can lower housing prices and make homeownership more accessible, especially for young couples who struggle to afford both home and kids. (A brief dig through the archives of the conservative Heritage Foundation turns up years of praise for Houston's unusual lack of zoning restrictions on exactly these grounds, and The American Conservative regularly publishes arguments for upzoning, including advocacy for doing away with single-family zoning altogether.) Also, having a granny flat means you might actually live with your granny, who can pass along familial traditions and help with childcare, a very attractive option amid pandemic. Surely this is the kind of pro-family, even pro-natalist policy Republicans ought to like. Why is Trump railing against it?

Because polls show the suburbs losing interest in Trump.

In those remarks and an even shorter comment on the subject three days prior, Trump singled out an Obama-era rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), which Biden supports and which Trump promised to repeal. That repeal arrived Thursday. The adfarm-near-me/">ministration characterizes it as a strike for freedom, federalism, and family. It is none of those things.

AFFH didn't "force" municipalities to do anything, as some conservatives have alleged. It mainly set conditions on some federal housing and transportation subsidies. (Suburbia is very subsidy-dependent.) It told local governments that to receive cash from Washington, they'd have to meet certain requirements, most notably ending single-family zoning. But single-family zoning isn't the creature of local self-governance Trump suggests. It originated significantly because of a previous set of conditions for different federal subsidies — subsidies, in fact, introduced by the archetypical Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministration: the New Deal-era White House of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We've been talking about suburban subsidies for as long as the NA Confidential blog has existed. Take it away, Charles Marohn.

"[S]ingle-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt adfarm-near-me/">ministration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance," explains Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, a new urbanism advocacy organization. "So, [AFFH said,] suburban governments, you won't get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then," he continues. "And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?"

It makes no sense.

Ah, but there's even more to it.

In addition to being heavily subsidized in both construction and ongoing maintenance, much of suburbia was shaped by 20th-century housing and highway policies that implicitly or, sometimes, explicitly functioned to segregate American homes. "White flight" was not merely an organic movement of private prejudice and social fashion. It was in no small part engineered by federal policies, as Richard Rothstein has meticulously documented in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

"To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford," Rothstein writes. Some of this was classism, he notes, but some of it was done with "open racial intent."

This, might we suggest, is the underlying reason for the suburb hubbub.

The Obama adfarm-near-me/">ministration's AFFH rule focused on the residue of that deliberate segregation, and Trump's critique of it hasn't untangled the issue of federal manipulation of local policies from the issue of racist zoning. That makes it plausible to see his talk of single-family zoning as the bastion of suburban integrity as implicitly part of an older tradition of state-enforced racism. It's not unreasonable to wonder if being "invaded by negroes" is what Trump means when he deplores watching a "beautiful suburb ... go to hell."

If you have not previously read Marohn's articles about the Growth Ponzi Scheme, as published at Strong Towns, then now is the ideal time.

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 1

The underpinnings of the current financial crisis lie in a living arrangement—the American pattern of development—that does not financially support itself. 

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 2

If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. 

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 3

Our development pattern is not productive enough to sustain itself.

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 4

Our national economy is "all in" on the suburban experiment. We cannot sustain the trajectory we are on, but we've gone too far down the path to turn back.

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 5 (finale)

How did we build such an amazing place before the home mortgage interest deduction? How did we accomplish this before zoning? What created this place before we had state and federal subsidies of local water and sewer systems?

We began writing about the Growth Ponzi Scheme in 2011 with a prominent series of articles that outlined the way American cities, towns and neighborhoods were growing themselves into insolvency.  Since then, the Growth Ponzi Scheme has been discussed in numerous publications. The term, as we've defined it, continues to be widely used and cited.

Collaboration: "Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?"

Wolfgang Leonhard and Markus Wolf were from similar backgrounds. Both were privileged members of the East German Communist ruling class. Why did Leonhard defect to the West, while Wolf stayed to climb the ladder as the East German spy chief?

Republicans Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham both vociferously opposed Donald Trump in 2016. Why did Romney vote to find Trump guilty in his impeachment trial, while Graham has become perhaps The Donald's ranking bootlicker?

Collaboration versus dissent; how do they occur? The author explores the motivations involved, concentrating on collaboration. It's a long read and an extremely worthwhile use of your time. Thanks to FT for the nudge.

History Will Judge the Complicit, by Anne Appleaum (The Atlantic)

ON THE AVENUES: There, there. People are dying, so you may have to wait until 2021 for your pork chop sandwich.

Who ever thought that forty years of narrow selfish leadership of academic, corporate, and political institutions would lead to a population full of raw anger?
-- Matt Stoller

Last week militarized police and the National Guard units were deployed to disperse peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters using counter-insurgency techniques previously devised for use against "enemies" abroad.

This wasn’t sufficiently violent to suit President D. “Nero” Trump, who proposed using armed service regulars to attack American citizens and occupy their cities -- not unlike the Chinese did in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or the United States in Iraq 17 years ago.

Meanwhile in excess of 100,000 Americans have died from a mysterious novel virus, with the number of infections reaching upwards of 2,000,000. Between 30 and 40 million are unemployed, and taking these statistics into consideration over a meal of Olive Garden takeaway and hard seltzer, perhaps another 150 million of us have concluded (a) the virus doesn’t exist, or (b) if it does, it’s perfectly safe because FREEDOM, and (c) in any event the virus that is, or perhaps isn’t, was devised by pussy libtards in cahoots with the Chinese for use against OUR president, and this is why (d) blacks protesting perennial injustice should be crushed with surplus army gear, but whites objecting to science, protesting any semblance of justice for non-whites or failing the physical when attempting to join the local SWAT team must carry their own powerful armaments and weaponry anywhere they please as “penis proxies.”

(Credit LEO Weekly for “penis proxies.”)

Our Big Mac president recently embraced the aforementioned counter-insurgency techniques to have the way cleared for a photo-op at a church, holding a hastily borrowed Bible aloft, upside down, in his best choreographed attempt to appear engaged.

The same half of the population that has rejected science because STOCK MARKET GODDAMMIT applauded vigorously, pausing only to blame blacks for their own targeting by the militarized police.

Amid the bleating and babbling of those shaven-headed old white guys with sour expressions whose monster trucks now routinely travel 50 mph down Spring Street, safe in the knowledge that our own municipal enforcement mechanisms remain in hibernation deep within Jeff Gahan’s agoraphobic “pretend leader” bunker, I’ve spent the past few days wondering about the precise level of violent injustice required to bring forever snoozing New Albanians out into the streets to protest.

Now I know the answer: cancel Harvest Homecoming and watch as the yokels finally are stirred to action.

---

The Harvest Homecoming cancellation announcement came Wednesday evening from the organization’s governing committee. Apparently the officers embraced rationality in consideration of a plain fact grasped by virtually anyone who has ever attended the festival, this being that almost every aspect of the event’s success relies on a high volume of humans, not a few of them drunk, all of them eating, squeezed into relatively small areas of streetscape.

Most of the time this business plan works out as intended. However, 2020 emphatically is not “most of the time.” The committee rightly fed the facts into the public health calculator of spacing and hygiene necessary to contain the pandemic, crunched the numbers, and found -- alas -- that 2 + 2 still equals 4.

Harvest Homecoming will return in 2021, by which time the global health situation probably (although not necessarily “will”) be clearer. Caution? It’s the most balanced attitude toward unknown factors, and something not to be confused with fear.

Of course, as FDR reminded us, we have nothing to fear except being deprived of amenities and diversions guaranteed to us by the United States Constitution … or the Board of Public Works and Safety, at the very least.

---

Within seconds of the meeting’s final gavel, howls of Internet fury arose from the troll-in-the-mirror narcissists, who figuratively descended on Harvest Homecoming with eggs, toilet paper and so very much mangled syntax.

Seeing as I’m a connoisseur of humanity’s limitless capacity for illogical behavior, I risked the rhetorical rubber bullets cascading into a group of innocent bystanders (namely, Harvest Homecoming’s volunteer workers, who don’t deserve the abuse heaped on them by hordes of sheer dullards), strapped myself into several layers of PPE and dove into the social media scrum, only to be deafened by what sounded like hundreds, perhaps thousands of indignant, starving crows.

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me

You might say it was “enchanting.” Here are several examples.

ML (works at Humana): This is so overblown at this point.

BNB (hospital worker): So you can have thousands of people go protest but we can't have harvest???

WJ: maybe , you should have asked the people of New Albany about the cancellation of the harvest homecoming. before doing it. let us decide if , we want to take the chance or not.

BH (maintenance technician): 250,000 have died from covid...1.2 million died from the flu in 2017...🤔

MD (says he’s a University of Louisville graduate): This is dumb why not wait and see if this thing goes away! Cases she almost gone to zero!

TC: Man. Watch the downtown New Albany business district go belly up now. This was a BIG MONEY deal to a lot of businesses.

What in the name of rolled oysters, elephant ears and frozen chocolate covered bananas is the matter with you people?

I never thought I'd be defending the decision-making of the Harvest Homecoming committee, with which I’ve often differed, but it isn’t hard to put yourself in their shoes. Most of Harvest Homecoming’s governing committee members and volunteers are multi-generational lifers. Love the festival or hate it, they work throughout the year in preparation, and take their tasks very seriously.

This decision to cancel Harvest Homecoming in 2020 almost surely was the hardest thing these folks have ever had to do outside the heavy issues we all face in own personal lives. It’s mind-boggling to accuse them of taking their responsibilities lightly. This whole process must have been traumatic for them.

Did any of you think of THAT?

Here YOU are, masquerading as a “fan” of Harvest Homecoming until the going gets choppy and your field of vision narrows to the chief malady of our nation, in big-ass block letters: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.

Guess what, doofus: this may come as a surprise, but there are times when it isn’t about YOU; rather, there are times when it needs to be about all of US.

The Harvest Homecoming committee is being responsible and looking to the festival’s long-term prospects. That's savvy. Not everyone hereabouts rejects science, and it’s really hard to imagine big crowds turning out his year. If the committee goes fast, some of the throng will be back this year. If it goes slow, probably most of them will return in 2021.

To be fair, we’ve also heard from non-profit organizations as well as for-profit vendors, for whom Harvest Homecoming is a primary annual revenue source. There’ll be pain, just as there has been for the food and drink business. Losing St. Patrick’s Day wasn’t exactly enjoyable, nor being closed entirely or operating for more than two months on far less than 50% of customary sales volume.

It's what had to be done for the greater good. As with the pandemic writ large, perhaps the pain will lead to fresher thinking. Is there anything that can be done a little bit each day of the year to offset the risk of depending on just one week?

Must we go to the office five days a week, or can we work from home for three?

Is it really necessary for you to spit in my face while extolling the selfless virtues of The Donald?

As for the experts, well, if you’ve never been charged with thinking past the distance to where your car is parked, or planning activities for a few hundred thousand of your closest friends as opposed to heading down to the stop ‘n’ rob for a Big Gulp or three, then you may wish to get a life.

I’m told you can buy one at Amazon, although be forewarned.

The life you buy for yourself might be manufactured in China -- and then what?

---

Recent columns:

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The late, great Lee Kelly -- by Matt Nash.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: Godlessness in defense of heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Food is my friend, but please, I'm no foodie.

May 7: ON THE AVENUES: COVID tolls for thee -- whatever, so hurry and get your ass back into this seat.

Just a damn rant about "democracy grief."

It's a bit confounding to watch as Americans like Ms. Goldberg mourn something that barely ever existed. I've no use whatever for Donald Trump, and yet Trump has done nothing "to" America apart from accurately divining the obliviousness of its occupants as to eager culpability in their own oppression, which has far more to do with refusing to follow the money than visiting a therapist.

Democracy Grief Is Real, by Michelle Goldberg (New York Times)

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

Trump grasps the efficacy of following institutional weakness and native American anti-intellectualism to their logical conclusions, because that's where the money is.

But what if those "universal ideals" were little more than a chimera to begin with, mere window dressing to keep the inmates passive as they buy more articles they don't need and worship the palpably untrue?

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Was it true even then?

There is nothing more authoritarian and oligarchic than all-encompassing consumerism -- and this is our national religious. It's who we are and what we do.

We make choices as consumers every day that buttress capital accumulation and income inequality far more efficiently than Trump's ability (itself questionable) to enhance further injustice.

We do it to ourselves, don't we? It's the economic system, and the ability of some to position themselves within it to the exclusion of others. We keep paying them, and they keep getting more powerful ... and it's not trickling down, is it?

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch.

Look, if you want to repel the nasty bully, why are you handing the nasty bully most of your money every single day? It might be a better idea to take away the money from the oligarchs. Hit the oligarchs with your wallet for a change.

Since when are "democratic ideals" even measured by the amount of debt you've accumulated on your credit cards?

“The only other option is to quit and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

Generally speaking, didn't we accept it long before Trump became a factor? Conceding that to quote Thomas Jefferson puts one at great hazard, I persist in thinking that he had one indisputably great insight.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Yep; the Declaration of Independence (except for the enslaved).

Imperfect, but there it is. Move past this facile notion of "democracy grief" and ask yourself the pertinent questions: Are these evils sufferable? Are the forms to which you are accustomed still adequate?

If yes, then buy another car and head to the multiplex for another dose of Marvel comic movies.

If no, then you just might have some thinking to do. Lots of you keep talking about resisting the part of the iceberg that's visible. Maybe it's the system beneath the surface that needs alteration.

Losing basketball games to dogs, or why "This Is Going to Get Worse."

Burmila's thoughts are angry, gloomy, dark and largely accurate -- and the melancholy isn't confined to Trumpism.

This is Going to Get Worse, by Ed Burmila (The Baffler)

“Send her back” is what Trumpism has been all along

WATCHING A VIRTUALLY ALL-WHITE CROWD of viciously angry, red-faced people chanting “Send her back!” at the mention of Representative Ilhan Omar during the President’s latest herrenvolk rally was horrifying. But the real horror is that this, sixteen months out from the election, is just the tip of an iceberg. This is bad and it will get worse. Much worse.

The Democratic Party has little to offer in terms of solace, merely a promise to fail in the same way as before.

It will get worse because the Democratic Party still believes that the mushy center is the place to campaign against Trump, that white votes are the only votes worth winning, that people of color or young people will never vote so why bother giving them a reason to, and that, in the brilliant words of Chuck Schumer, “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

The following passage cuts closest to the bone. I may have arrived at the tail end of the Boomers, but in the final analysis, their narcissism wins out.

It will get worse because an entire generation of people under forty has already been written off to a life of lowered expectations and debt peonage—a generation that might get more riled up by the politics of Social Security and Medicare had they not already resigned themselves to the reality that neither will exist when, if, they reach old age. None of the relevant social, political, or economic institutions are undergoing an intergenerational transition of power; instead, Boomers have decided simply to stay at the helm until death comes, and since nobody except them has ever mattered it’s no big deal if everything burns down on their way out.

At least he's stunningly consistent: "Tom Friedman Has No Idea What He’s Talking About."

I first became aware of Thomas L. Friedman when my pal Barrie and I read From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), which described Friedman's feelings about Israel in the context of his work as a young reporter in the Middle East during the 1980s.

The book seemed solid to me, particularly the chapter called "Hama Rules," which bluntly detailed the horrifying violence directed against internal dissent by the elder Assad in Syria circa 1982, thus providing a preview of son Bashar's predictable instincts during the country's recent civil war.

However this passage at Wikipedia suggests that I didn't necessarily have a wider frame of reference at the time.

It received the 1989 National Book Award for Nonfiction and also the Cornelius Ryan Award. In a book review for The Village Voice, Edward Said criticized what he saw as a naive, arrogant, and orientalist account of the Israel–Palestine conflict.

There's little sense in belaboring the point, which comes down to this: As my frame of reference widened, Friedman's credibility shrank in proportion. His article last week, as dissected here by Elie Mystal, was like an itemized list of centrist wrong-thinking in response to Trumpism.

I haven't read a column by Friedman for a very long time, and propose to double down on what is proving to be a correct decision on my part.

Tom Friedman Has No Idea What He’s Talking About, by Elie Mystal (The Nation)

Every pundit urging moderation was wrong in 2016, and they’re wrong now.

There is one, and I’ll argue only one, thing that Thomas Friedman gets right in his latest New York Times column “‘Trump’s Going to Get Re-Elected, Isn’t He?’”—and that one thing is the fact that people are asking that question a lot. The fear is palpable. The fear is real that somehow the Democratic Party will fail to the meet the unique danger posed by the incumbent president.

Fear can be a powerful motivator, but fear also causes people to make bad arguments and promote silly things. Thomas Friedman is afraid, and it shows. His prescription for the Democrats to confront the danger of Donald Trump is well-meaning inanity, the kind you find in a squirrel who hears a hawk and runs around in a circle because it can’t remember where the tree is.

The particular hawk that seems to have set Friedman off this time was the first round of Democratic debates. Friedman watched them and did not like what he saw. He was “shocked.” No, really, he used the word “shocked” five times to describe the ideas he heard from Democrats, which is an interesting word choice considering Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Maybe he expected Democrats to offer the same kind of fiscally conservative, socially moderate, wildly unpopular policies that served Jeb! so very well against Trump?

From Friedman:

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait.

This poor man has it so twisted around that he’s decided it’s the Democrats who are threatening to nominate somebody indecent and insane.

"Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, when language is distorted, when power is abused, when we want to know how bad things can get."

The book is The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, and The Guardian offers a preview.

Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Dorian Lynskey

Every generation turns to it in times of political turmoil, and this extract from a new book about the novel examines its relevance in the age of fake news and Trump

Orwell’s fear, incubated during the months he spent fighting in the Spanish civil war, that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” is the dark heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It gripped him long before he came up with Big Brother, Oceania, newspeak or the telescreen, and it’s more important than any of them. In its original 1949 review, Life correctly identified the essence of Orwell’s message: “If men continue to believe in such facts as can be tested and to reverence the spirit of truth in seeking greater knowledge, they can never be fully enslaved.” Seventy years later, that feels like a very large if.

Previous mentions:

Amid the vapid intellectual carnage inflicted by pay-to-play Gahanism, it's worth thinking about George Orwell's fundamental truthfulness.

Gahan Doublespeak Blues (Husqvarna Mix): Say goodbye to your trees, Mt. Tabor Road residents, because it's time again to "improve the tree canopy" by flattening a few hundred of them.

THE BEER BEAT: The Moon Under Water -- so, how does Orwell's perfect pub look today?

Sunday morning coffee reading: "Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity."

Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and right about now.

"Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict."

I'll be perfectly honest with you.

My 40th high school reunion took place earlier this year. I had a previous commitment one of the two nights, and I was busy the other night but might have been able to be there for a little while had I chosen to expend the effort.

I didn't, because my preference is to remember my high school classmates as they were, not as they've become, at least some of the ones with whom I was closest, because I'd rather not listen to higher-income white guys have a few too many drinks and begin prattling on about the wonders of Trump.

That's bullshit.

In fairness, I know for a fact that many of my old friends from school don't feel this way, and of course not all of them are higher income. Yes, I know it's very complicated. But Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and to insist that this disease emanates solely from working class Americans when the national Democratic Party has itself promoted trickle-down economic inequality for decades, while merrily cashing checks from the same donors as Trump's, is bullshit on top of bullshit.

Sorry about my better-heeled pals from days of yore. At the same time, nothing much occurred prior to the advent of Trump to suggest their outcomes would be any different. I've no clue how I managed to escape the contagion. Travel? Core values? Plain dumb luck? I'm just grateful I did.

Now, please read this article in its entirety.

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans, by Sarah Smarsh (The Guardian)

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

 ... Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9: "The film is as much about how the left and the media have failed us as it is about the dangers of Trump."

I'll pay to watch it.

Michael Moore’s terrifying “Fahrenheit 11/9″: Trump is the symptom, not the disease, by Sophia A. McClennen

“Fahrenheit 11/9″ takes an unflinching look at how Donald Trump rose to power and what we can do about it

This:

“Fahrenheit 11/9” draws on this rich legacy to offer viewers Moore’s most powerful movie yet. The film uses the story of the rise of Trump to document the failures, weaknesses and flaws in our democracy. For Moore, the story of Trump is not a story about a momentary breakdown in a system that allowed a dangerous, narcissist to come to power; it is a story about a system that has been careening towards this outcome for decades.

And this:

At the heart of the film is the message that abusive systems of power depend on a public that is complacent, compromising, passive and distracted. In order to draw out how we came to be a nation where so few people vote and even fewer feel like their voices matter, Moore takes aim across the political spectrum. One of the most powerful aspects of the film is the way that Moore pulls no punches as he outs the establishment left and faults them for their complicity with corporate capital. Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all come under fire as Moore reveals how they sold out the ideals of the Democratic Party to corporate backers.

Also at Salon, a follow-up. I've chosen one crucial excerpt.

Lessons from Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9″: Establishment Democrats sold out the voters, by Sophia A. McClennen

Moore’s film is as much about how the left and the media have failed us as it is about the dangers of Trump

 ... 4. The Democrats share a lot of blame for the rise of Trump.

Moore doesn’t just show Obama’s disturbing behavior in Flint; he also reminds viewers of how cozy he was with Wall Street. In a series of scenes that will likely disturb many viewers, he dives deep into the ways that establishment Democrats have sold out the party’s ideals and their voters. From Bill Clinton's pro-corporate policies to his ramping up of prison populations, Moore shows how party leaders since the Bill Clinton era have alienated voters and moved the party to the right.

Moore brings up the issue of super delegates and their role in the 2016 presidential race, but he does so as only part of a larger exposé of the ways that party leaders have suppressed progressive candidates. Rather than focus only on Bernie Sanders, Moore makes it clear that what happened to Sanders has happened down ticket as well. To drive home the point, “Fahrenheit 11/9” includes a taped conversation where Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who’s been in office since 1981, telling progressive Colorado candidate Levi Tillemann to drop out of the race and cede the spot to the more centrist candidate. When Tilleman questions Hoyer’s interference, Hoyer responds smugly that he has repeatedly chosen who gets to run for the party.

Taken together these scenes help paint a clear picture for why #DemExit grew in steam over the 2016 election, potentially paving the way for the Trump win.

Again at Salon, box office context.

How Donald Trump could help Michael Moore return as the king of documentary box office, by Tom Brueggemann

“Fahrenheit 11/9″ comes 14 years after “Fahrenheit 9/11″ smashed documentary records

... As always, Moore is his film’s marketing campaign; he’s gambling that he can recreate the appeal of “Bowling For Columbine” and “9/11″ after a decade of seeing his films face declining results. His biggest hits came in the early George W. Bush years, when he was positioned as part of the resistance. (His last two documentaries came while Obama was president.) His last film, “Where To Invade Next,” grossed just $3.8 million in February 2016 — but that was months before anyone took Donald Trump seriously.

This cycle works both ways. Moore’s right-wing doppelganger Dinesh D’Sousa made three anti-Obama and Clinton documentaries between 2012-2016: “Obama’s America,” “Hillary’s America,” and “America.” All grossed as well or better than Moore’s documentaries during the same period. But his most recent release, “Death of a Nation,” didn’t top $6 million despite a 1,000-theater opening.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: A heartbreaking work of staggering asininity.

Today's column is occasioned by National Review's Jonah Goldberg, whose writing style I admire although his political worldview isn't always my particular brand of kombucha (it's an insider reference) -- well, after all, I'm more of a pre-Putin kvass kind of guy.

Our word is right there in the title: The G-Files by Jonah Goldberg: Authentic Asininity.

Asininity is a noun describing the quality of being asinine.

asinine
[as-uh-nahyn]
adjective

1. foolish, unintelligent, or silly; stupid: It is surprising that supposedly intelligent people can make such asinine statements.
2. of or like an ass: asinine obstinacy; asinine features.

Origin of asinine
1600-10; < Latin asinīnus, equivalent to asin(us) ass1+ -īnus -ine1

Related forms
asininely, adverb ... asininity [as-uh-nin-i-tee] noun

Relax, Jeffrey. You have the day off.

In case you were wondering, Goldberg is pointing "asininity" directly at the defenders of POTUS in the wake of the now-forgotten "shithole" furor.

... Let’s start with the question of Donald Trump’s racism. I find the competition to be most offended by the offensiveness of President Trump’s fecal-crater comments to be more than a little tedious. Don’t get me wrong: I think they were offensive and, yes, racist. But that, to me, is the least interesting aspect of this episode of The Trump Show ...

... The idea that anything the president says can be justified by simply asserting that he’s speaking in the authentic voice of his base is an argument no conservative would dream of making under an Elizabeth Warren presidency. Lending credence to it is not only politically myopic, but it lends support to the centrifugal forces tearing this country apart. It is the type of thinking I associate with “sh**hole” countries — to borrow a phrase. In many third-world countries, tribes and other factions vie to gain power and then reward only their team. That is contrary to virtually everything good and noble about our constitutional system.

Asininity enters here; like father, like son, so let's meet the latest Jerry Falwell, latest charlatan in a line of Falwells, described by Goldberg as "the Bishop of Hereford of the Trump administration."

AUTHENTIC ASININITY ... Falwell, in a riot of sycophantic sophistry, not only wants to argue that whatever a president does is presidential but also seeks to elevate the idea that authenticity is its own reward. This is contrary to vast swathes of conservative and Christian thought. A person can be authentically evil, crude, bigoted, or asinine. That is not a defense of any of those things. I’m no expert, but my understanding of Christianity is that behavior is supposed to be informed by more than one’s “authentic” feelings and instincts. Satan is nothing if not authentic. As I write at length in my forthcoming book, this society-wide romantic obsession with authenticity — not just among Trump supporters, but across the left and much of the right — is a deeply corrupting force. But let’s stay on topic. The White House’s initial statement — which didn’t deny the sh**hole report — says in part, “Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people.” Put aside the blasé and unsubstantiated insinuation of unpatriotic motives to critics and the political class generally. The upshot of this claim is that calling scores of nations — many of which are our allies — “sh**holes” is really a form of fighting for the American people. If that were true, virtually any crude insult would be just another example of “presidential” heroism. Count me out of that idiotic argument.

I'm happy to allow a conservative thinker to draw his conclusion, especially here at a bastion of pants-down socialism.

THE REAL ISSUE(S) If anyone is still with me, let me now turn to what I think is the real significance of all this. It’s not immigration or racism or profanity; it’s Donald Trump and what he is doing to the country and his party ...

 ... Republicans have bet that James Carville was right and that the logic of “it’s the economy, stupid” will vanquish all obstacles. But this has never been an Iron Law of Politics ...

 ... The long-term threat to conservatism and, by extension, the GOP is profound. Young people — the largest voting bloc now — are utterly turned off to the Republican party. That doesn’t make them right, but that’s irrelevant. Their opinions are hardening every single day, even as old white people shuttle off this mortal coil. Maybe there’s a deep and principled argument to make in favor of Trump’s sh**holish gaffes. But very few people outside the ranks of the converted want to hear it. All they hear are defenses of, or deflections from, the issues that arouse their passion. When conservatives and Republicans rush to defend Trump’s indefensible actions, all they are doing is convincing more people that “Trumpism” isn’t confined to Trump. That damage won’t be erased by another record stock-market closing or an uptick in the GDP numbers. It will outlive The Trump Show for generations.

Too bad so few Democrats have a palatable alternative. Thanks for the link, K.